I probably won’t feel the need to update this again, but we did receive a lot of information surrounding trade in the last couple weeks that I felt needed to be added here. None of this information included any specifics as to how trade will work or anything but rather how it’s progressing, and that some form of trade would indeed be included in patch 0.9.
Mike reiterates much of what he said during the September 2, 2022 dev stream.
Q: Do you have a post up for your most current thoughts on trade economy for multiplayer? Like how it’ll work, etc.
No, we don’t actually. There’s basically no information up on the way trade is going to be at all at the moment. We’re still pretty early in its development and we’ve realized that we need to be able to test it and make sure it’s what we want before we really detail to everyone what it’s going to be. In fact, we’ve just had our very first successful item transfers. We’re really early in the testing of item transfer systems and we’re still working out all the kinks on those systems. We’ll need to get some testing in before we finish the design and start actually talking about what it’s going to be.
Source: YouTube Link
This was the first of two Multiplayer Dev Q&A streams that took place. Judd talks about trade from a high-level viewpoint and reveals that their first trade system will be tested by the Community Testers in the coming weeks to get feedback on before being unveiled to everyone at a later date. Also, Dan speaks to just how much they’ve discussed trade and the options they’ve considered.
Q: With multiplayer, how is Last Epoch going to deal with “ease of access” to gear? There are criticisms of the trade systems of Path of Exile (free trade to all) and Diablo 3 (essentially 0 trade). What are long-term and short-term plans for Last Epoch in relation to trading gear and crafting materials?
Judd: We’re mindful of how our systems up to this point have been created to enable a great solo experience. With the Monolith giving an amount of target farming paired with our directed crafting system, gear drops in multiplayer will be individual and a core goal for trade in Last Epoch will be to ensure that it does not significantly take over progression from those systems. Again, when it comes to trade, we’ll be trialing a version of trade in the coming weeks within our CT program that we hope to get good feedback on.
Zizaran: Cool. It’s going to be a hard problem to solve. It must be interesting entering a genre that has so many other games in it as well.
Judd: Oh absolutely, and trade is so incredibly important to how progression in these games come about. We completely understand the implications that implementing any type of trade inside of these games have and we’re approaching it very carefully and thoughtfully with all the experience from the other games in the genre before us.
Dan: Yeah, a lot of the time talking about trade we recognize breaking down all of the problems that other games have made numerous attempts at systems and we kind of had history to understand it.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: What happened to the ideas of a restricted trading that were referred to as the bazaar during the Kickstarter?
Judd: Yeah, the bazaar. We were very keen on this idea, enough to even actually speak about it publicly back in, I think, like 2019 or something. There was an extensive thread that I still think has more comments than any other thread that we’ve ever posted. In short, we found a number of flaws with the system that didn’t line up with our goal of not letting trade take over the gearing progression that we’ve solidified into the game. There were a lot of aspects of it that we were keen on but it just ultimately didn’t meet our expectations for what we want in a trade system.
Zizaran: Right, and you didn’t really have anything final to say about where trade is going, right?
Judd: Not yet. What I can say is that we don’t want a trade system in the game to be the best or most efficient way to always gain gear upgrades.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: With multiplayer coming in now and the potential for trading, have you guys talked about things like bind on equip, bind on pickup, bind on trade?
Dan: Oh yes, and I believe a couple of the conversations that we had to great length were when you mentioned them, but we’d also thought about them ourselves too. So yes, we have thought heavily about all of those things and we’re taking them under consideration. We’ve gone as far as to discuss even how RuneScape does its economy. We’ve looked all the way back. We even discussed the actual bazaar in EverQuest. We’ve gone through the history of economies and MMO’s and ARPG’s to try to figure out what about them we enjoy the most. So it’s been very in-depth. That’s why we don’t want to speak too much on it now as we’re still kind of bringing light to that whole process that we’ve been working on for so long.
Source: YouTube Link
In this second Multiplayer Dev Q&A stream Judd and Dan reiterate a lot of what was said in the first stream – detailing many of the high-level goals they have for trade and how important it is that they get it right for the game they’re trying to make.
Q: What are the plans for trade?
Judd: Yeah, we know that people are anxiously awaiting information on trade. It has huge implications in games like this. We won’t be unveiling our updated plans for trade today, but I will say that our first trial of trade is going into the CT build to gather feedback on within the next week or so. I will say that our main goal with trade has always been to ensure that it does not become the main or always best way to obtain gear, upgrades, and sidestep the item hunt and crafting system we’ve poured a lot of love into. So those are the main goals and we have a trial for what this will be. Hopefully we’ll get good feedback on this when it comes out in the near future for our CT program.
Dan: Yeah, I think you were mentioning that, you know, something that we talked about before – you don’t really want to promise things about a trade system before you’ve actually had a chance to test it, try it, and get good player feedback. So we definitely want to make sure we do that this time around.
Source: YouTube Link
Judd: In general, we try to provide everything that a player is going to need directly in-game. We go really over and above here, or at least we try to, and we’re going to continue to. There’s things like the in-game guide that will give you a lot of information. We’re trying to make it so that with the trade system that we incorporate it doesn’t make you actually have to leave the game. We’re trying to make that all-inclusive in the game itself.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Will the item crafting process or itemization be adapted due to multiplayer release?
Steelmage: I think you probably covered this yesterday, but it’s a pretty big one right – the way multiplayer is going to change gear acquisition and gearing and all that.
Dan: Yeah totally. I mean, for us, it’s important that items primarily come from finding and crafting them. We do think that process feels pretty good right now. It’s a priority to avoid kind of compromising what we have. We’re not really going to give out details to trade yet, which is where this is slowly going, but it’s definitely a huge priority that we don’t disrupt what we have for the itemization process going into launch.
Steelmage: I know a lot of people really like that genuine – like balanced around solo I guess is the way of putting it. Like you can play the game and get very far on your own. It does feel good and it doesn’t feel very good when it feels like you have to trade to progress your character – like that is the most efficient path.
Dan: Totally.
Judd: We don’t want to disrupt that.
Dan: Absolutely.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: So should we just talk about trade again? I mean, because a lot of people keep asking about trade. Could we talk about that in a sort of generic sense because I know nothing is ready to announce yet, but do you have any like stories about discussions regarding trade? Like what happened with the bazaar?
Judd: I mean, trade is just so important and the implications are so large that we’ve had discussions about trade more than absolutely anything in the game period. We’ve been having those discussions at this point for five years without actually putting out anything in the wild. We have, as a very large proponent of players in the genre, we’ve played all of these games and people that we continue to hire play these games for thousands of hours and we know what comes from just even small decisions to trade.
We know that we’re not going to make absolutely everybody happy with any type of trade system that we put out there. So we really have to go back to the roots of what is Last Epoch and how we’ve built this game to be played and make sure that the trading system that we implement into the game does not overrule or adulterize what we’ve created here. We’ve created a game that the experience of going and finding loot and crafting that loot does feel good at the moment so we want to make sure that doesn’t change. There’s been an absolute ton of conversations on trade – it’s been excessive.
Steelmage: Yeah, I’d love to peep one of those conversations but maybe after trade’s released.
Judd: Yeah, you know, I can at least say that with the conversations that we have with trade we finally have nearly the entire team on board with the decision that we’re trialing in the near future. It makes sense to nearly every single person on the team and that’s a really good indication that we’ve arrived at something that we think is good for Last Epoch.
Source: YouTube Link
Mike reiterates points he’s discussed in both the September 2nd and 9th streams, but then reveals that the plan is to have some form of item transfer available in patch 0.9.
Q: Can you drop items in instances for other people?
Right now it doesn’t work yet. We’ve just had our, like, first practical item transfer happen – it went from one character back to that same character. Actually, we may have a little bit more than that happening now. I know there was a little bit of a break from working on that because we had to get some other stuff done for a patch that was coming for the Community Tester build. Unfortunately, there’s no details on trade that we can share yet. We’re still very early in the development process.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Is the bazaar close?
No, we have abandoned the bazaar. I apologize if you’re still seeing material on our website that talks about it. Hopefully that’s taken down already. We noticed there was some really old material on one of the sub-pages that we did not mean to still be there. We noticed that very recently as someone pointed it out on the forums for us.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: We should have some form of trade in 0.9 though, right?
I just want to be clear on what the definition of the term trade is. When you say some form of trade, the question that I’m answering is – will there be any method by which items can move between characters in some way? That is the plan, yes. What that looks like, any details of what that is…no information. Though, the plan is to have some way where items are transferred from some character to some other character in some situation, somehow. I hope that was clear.
Source: YouTube Link
Again, Mike comments that some form of trade is planned to be coming in patch 0.9.
Q: Do you plan to release multiplayer and trade soon?
So multiplayer is coming with our next major patch and the form of item transference between players, whatever that looks like, will be with that initial drop. We don’t have any timelines on when that will be specifically because it’s very much a when it’s ready thing.
We’re currently in closed testing for our multiplayer systems with a group of Community Testers. The Community Tester program is an open application process that has an almost 100% acceptance rate at this point, I think, but it just takes a while to get in. If you’ve submitted to that and you’re not in yet, I apologize. We’re working on it and we’re working on making the process faster too because we’ve got way more applications than we thought we’d have. Apparently there’s a lot of people that are interested in it. If you do get into that, a note in general, it’s still not a finished product yet and there’s a very long list of known bugs that I strongly recommend reading first before you start reporting bugs because most reports I see are on that list. Yeah, so we’re still working on it and there’s no details yet.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: When can we expect trading to come? Sometime after 1.0?
There will be a method by which items can be transferred between two players in 0.9, when that comes out.
Source: YouTube Link
Mike comments that nothing is known about how any future trade system will function and that they’re still working on its implementation and testing. So, nothing really new here but I included it anyways.
Q: This has probably been asked a million times but I couldn’t get a clear answer from the community. Can other players see the items we drop from our inventory in the 0.9 update?
The reason you can’t get a clear answer is that they don’t know. If anyone has said that they do, it is speculative. We haven’t stated if you will or not upon 0.9.
The closest thing to a reply to this that we have given in the past was that in a dev stream a few weeks back, someone asked something along the lines of drop trading could be added if a proper trade window setup wasn’t going to be possible. I replied that drop trading is probably actually even harder than a proper trade window.
There is no information as to the style or details of what the system by which items can be transferred from one player to another (trade) will be as of 0.9 or 1.0.
I know everyone is really anxious to learn more about our plans for trade but we aren’t ready to talk about it yet. We are still in early stages of initial implementation and it needs a lot more work before it’s ready for testing, let alone proper feedback and assessment. All of which needs to happen before we discuss it.
Source: Discord Link
I imagine the next time we receive any meaningful information concerning trade it’ll be within its own development blog. I’m looking forward to it.
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